The play begins on the night librarian/aspiring writer Ben rescues a beautiful naked woman, Tracy, from the ocean and brings her into his Cape Cod beach house to recuperate. Tracy claims it was not a suicide attempt but that she was dancing in the ocean. Ben doubts this but does his best to take care of her. Soon the two find that they have conflicting personalities, but try to work through them and gradually get closer to one another. Ben is fascinated and amused by her feisty behavior and eccentric sense of humor and falls for her. Tracy's first impulse is to break their connection, out of fear of the pain of loving someone and then inevitably losing them. As the story continues we see them struggling to find a way to save their difficult relationship, which is constantly threatened by Tracy's serious trust issues.[2] After a crisis involving the possibility of an unexpected pregnancy, Tracy is finally able to reveal the origins of her fear of attachment in her childhood horror at the meaningless suffering of innocent creatures. The indifference of the universe to the suffering of the innocent is embodied for her in the eyes of the sharks in the ocean. The relationship with Ben has brought to the surface all of her deepest anxieties and fears.[1]
Seascape With Sharks And Dancer Pdf Freel
Fear effects of predators on prey distributions are seldom considered in marine environments, especially over large spatial scales and in conservation contexts. To fill these major gaps, we tested the Seascape of Fear Hypothesis in the Benguela marine ecosystem off South Africa. Using electronic tracking data, we showed that Cape gannets and their predator, the Cape fur seal, co-occurred in daytime and competed with fisheries within coastal areas. At night, gannets are particularly vulnerable to seals, and 28% of the birds returned to the safety of their breeding colony. The remaining 72% slept at the sea surface, but shifted to offshore areas with lower seal attendance, reducing predation risk by 25%. Overall, our integrative study demonstrates how fear and competition shape the seascape of threatened Cape gannets within a marine environment perturbed by climate change and overfishing. Such knowledge has strong implications for the design of marine protected areas.
Seascape ecology is on the rise. Decades after the advent of landscape ecology, its aquatic counterpart has taken a giant footstep1. Indeed, this fusion of geography and ecology benefited from geospatial revolution, with the rapid development of global data acquisition and mapping tools. Those allow assessing the effect of structural environmental conditions upon the biogeography of marine organisms. In this context, a major constraint is the fear effect, i.e., the spatial variation in prey perception of predation risk, termed the Landscape of Fear (LoF)2, and later extended to the Seascape of Fear (SoF)3. Fear effects modify prey behavior, induce diel migratory patterns4 and entail energetic costs, with cascading effects onto population dynamics and entire ecosystems5,6. The fearscape concept has gained substantial interest across the last decade, with renewed focus on temporal dynamics4,5. Surprisingly, such fear effects are not addressed by Pittman1 in their seminal work on seascape ecology.
We tested the SoF hypothesis at a regional scale in the ecologically perturbed Benguela upwelling ecosystem off South Africa. There, Cape gannets (Morus capensis) are at risk from predation by Cape fur seals (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus), specifically when resting at the water surface during the night when they are most vulnerable to underwater predator attacks. Such predation events have been documented on land and at sea7,8 (Supplementary Data 1), but their impacts on Cape gannet at-sea behavior has never been tested, thereby blurring our understanding of non-consumptive effects at a regional scale. Moreover, gannets compete with seals and regional fisheries for the consumption of diminishing stocks of small pelagic fish (sardines Sardinops sagax and anchovies Engraulis encrasicolus), but are provisioned with fishery wastes dumped at sea by trawlers targeting hake (Merlucius spp.)9. In this context, we hypothesized that spatiotemporal variations in fear and competition contribute to shaping the spatial ecology of gannets in the Benguela upwelling ecosystem. Specifically, we predicted that (1) birds would avoid seals at all times, especially during the riskiest nighttime period. This was predicted to induce diel gannet spatial shifts at sea, towards safer areas at night. However, during the less risky daytime period, gannets have to balance predation risk by seals with their foraging needs. We predicted that (2) birds would compete with seals and fisheries while feeding at sea during daytime. Alternatively, we hypothesized that thermoregulatory constraints also shaped gannet at sea distributions. We took advantage of a large multi-year data set, which included electronic tracking of at-sea movements for seals and gannets in the Southern Benguela upwelling ecosystem, as well as the distribution of fishing activities and sea surface temperatures in this region. On the basis of this information, we assessed the at-sea spatial ecology of the different marine predators involved in the Benguela seascape.
Interestingly, studies of zooplankton vertical migration first pointed to the LoF, but this concept has been mainly studied within terrestrial landscapes4,5. Indeed, so far only 4.3% (10/230, ISI Web of Science April 2021) of publications which addressed the LoF2,5 did so in a marine context. Most such studies focused on coastal reef habitats12,13, to the neglect of pelagic ecosystems3,14 and large spatial scales11,15. We fill these major gaps, by providing, to the best of our knowledge, the first evidence for a SoF in an upwelling ecosystem, at a regional scale. Our analyses confirm that seabirds avoid seals16 whenever they can, but in the Benguela upwelling ecosystem other top predators add layers of complexity to the pelagic fearscape. Notably, great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are known to target both seals and seabirds17, even though they are far less abundant than seals. Orcas (Orcinus orca) may also take seals and great white sharks. We are therefore calling for SoF studies considering trophic networks within pelagic ecosystems, to rigorously understand fear effects on the spatiotemporal distribution of aquatic animals6, and their population consequences5.
Finally, we spatially predicted the binned RSF scores (10 bins) for each seal colony within our study area34. We assessed the seascape of fear by overlapping the three colony-specific RSF maps and retaining the maximum value among the three maps for each pixel. 2ff7e9595c
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